[eagle] Major Eagle events

All:
I send this separate note to advise you of some major developments with
Eagle. Many of you are already aware of them, but in case I missed
someone, I send this separate update.
Two nights ago, I authorized expenditure of funds for purchase of
components and construction of four prototypes of the UHF receiver
designed by John Stephenson, KD6OZH.
The boards will be distributed as follows:
one to Juan Rivera, WA6HTP, for Acceptance Testing followed by
limited vacuum and thermal testing
one to be demonstrated at Dayton
one to the SDX folks for their development
one to be put through the ATP either here by me, or wherever anyone
else wants to evaluate. This will then become available as needed for
demonstrations or SDX development
Events leading to this decision:
Design by John and Peer review
Development of ATP by Juan and peer review
Assembly of a procurement, construction, and test team of Project
Oscar members under Juan's leadership
PCBoard layout by John. Peer review of schematic to board
correlation in progress
Development of costed Bill of Materials (BOM) by the Project Oscar
team. This was a LOT of work, and actually resulted in some tweaks to
design and component selection
Peer review of the BOM in progress
I have authorized $4100 for this effort. A small fraction of this cost
includes consumables for surface mount construction and some assembly
tools which will become AMSAT property and will be used again. AMSAT
costs were reduced by a significant amount of "scrounging."
I submitted some of this information for publication in ANS, but don't
yet know if I was ahead of the deadline or not.. If I was late, I hope
it will appear next week.
This seems to me a huge step. We have completed one design cycle on one
component and are now about to transition, for that one component, from
the concept exploration/definition phase into construction of hardware.
Prototype hardware, yes, but we will soon have some real test results
and something real to show. The short list above belies a whole lot of
work by a whole lot of folks, alll of whom I thank. Many of you
participated in the earlier reviews of John's design and Juan's ATP.
The near-frantic effort over the last few weeks by John and the Project
Oscar folks (many of whom I'm just getting to know through various
emails and echolink conferences) has been intense.
As we progress with procurement and construction, I will receive and
share progress updates as major milestones are met.
The documents mentioned above are not all on EaglePedia yet, but will
be. In particular, one unexpected fallout of the recent efforts is a
BOM which may be a good template for other teams to use. It certainly
made it easy for me to see and understand, "how many, how much?"
Thank you all.
Very 73,
Jim
wb4gcs at amsat.org